The webinar was conducted by EQ Magazine on 20th May 2022. It was moderated by Mr. Azhar Othman, Group Chief Executive Officer (Moderator). In the consecutive session, numerous climates related issues and solutions were discussed brilliantly.
The insightful session was incandescently moderated by Mr. Azhar Othman – Group Chief Executive Officer – GENES GROUP OF COMPANIES where he delightfully discussed various, Financing options for rooftop solar projects, Carbon Credit Policies, and the Market Landscape Policies in Singapore.
Mr. Michael Bernil – Co-founder, CEO – Energy Lite Delivered a brief introduction about Energy Lite, Asia’s first virtual solar development platform, and distinctive financing options for rooftop solar projects in Singapore. Exceeding the conversation he revealed their business process where they together with their financing partner help smaller businesses to install zero-upfront investment solar panels and harness the power of the sun proficiently through a combination of hardware and software solutions. To make the development process more efficient and cheaper, Energy Lite develops and uses its proprietary software to handle the full development process virtually. Mr. Michael in the further conversation, gave an insight about the present market scenario of Singapore and delivered rigorous information on residential as well as the C&l rooftop Market Landscape, and mentioned according to National Solar Repository, the Residential solar market has installed around 10 Megawatt solar panels whereas C&I solar market has installed more than 400 Megawatt solar panels. From his outlook, there’s a great opportunity for the solar industry in Singapore, due to the overpriced electricity rate.
Mr. Shubhomoy Ray – Managing Partner & CEO – InfraBlocks Capital Pte Ltd Shared his views on financing opportunities and said” the rooftop market is developing and the financing opportunities are going to increase, there are entities who are working out of Singapore to develop the regional market, we have a private license from MAS and we have a fund which is focused on net-zero”. In further conversation, he discussed the announcement of the Singapore Government regarding the cost of the tax on carbon, which will eventually increase the carbon demand shortly.
Mr. Deepak Khetarpal – Chief Operations Officer – South East Asia – SunSource Energy continued the panel discussion by focusing on the landscape policy of solar in Singapore as well as in other countries too. He mentioned in the conversation that “we have around 400 Megawatt of the capacity of solar installed, and with the green plan Government plans to do 2 Gigawatt by 2030. so in terms of the market, there is still 1.5 Gigawatt of market left which needs to be done in another 8 years, it’s a decent market for a country or a state of 720 square kilometers. In the current scenario, Singapore will provide 200 Megawatt per year and in addition, to invest in other technologies, there’s is also a target of around 200 megawatts of storage, so this storage technology will attract investment in the country” mentioned Mr. Deepak in the further discussion.
Mr. Raghavendra Lawaniya – Vice President Operations – Sunkonnect Pte Ltd mentioned a few major points for the carbon neutrality of Singapore as well as for other countries. Firstly the small-scale solar PV Finance, the Residential finance. In his opinion financing for residential customers should be cheap enough to lend into a long-term lower cost PPA. So he recommended,new and innovative methodologies of financing scheme. Another major concern according to Mr. Raghavendra is the REC trading, where there’s a major issue with registering the assets, and the cost-benefit ratio is also not there for small-scale rooftop projects. In this case, there’s a need to evaluate certain methodologies to make the registration cost or validating cost, cost-effective advised Mr. Raghvendra. In concluding the discussion he mentioned one more setback regarding the energy generation of Singapore in-house, where he suggested the residents of Singapore should focus more on COS projects, to shift from gas to a higher percentage renewable mix.
Mr Sadanand Tewari – Senior Manager – EnKing International Demonstrated a concise introduction of EKI Energy Services Ltd, the world’s largest carbon asset management firm. Mr. Sadanand continued the panel discussion by explaining more about the business process of EKI, where they do manage the carbon assets and currently they are managing more than 9 Gigawatt of RE Installation across the globe with having a local presence in more than 16 countries. Speaking specifically about Singapore Mr. Sadanand put forwarded his opinion and conveyed that, Singapore already has a carbon tax and again the Government is planning to raise the carbon tax, which shows they are proposing a new carbon tax scheme to accumulate the demand for carbon credits.
